


his brother’s keeper

by Mythopoeia



Series: All That Glitters: Gold Rush!AU [47]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Celegorm is a Good Brother and Huan is a Good Dog, Gen, Gold Rush AU, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Primarily set during #38 in this AU, but 1850s feanorians don’t know that, thank goodness olorin has taught Fingon about carbolic acid, whiskey is not a cure all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 10:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18408971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythopoeia/pseuds/Mythopoeia
Summary: This is how you break a wild horse: gently. Not that Celegorm wishes to think of his eldest brother in terms of breaking, but there it is.





	his brother’s keeper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TolkienGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/gifts), [Victoryindeath2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoryindeath2/gifts).



_In Utah, the whole world looks sculpted by massive hands, stone scooped aside to show red and white striations like layers of muscle, bright and brilliant beneath a distant blue sky. There are mountains like cathedrals, complete with spires and cut-out windows, and canyons so deep and dizzying Celegorm has to fight back the urge to grab the twins by the scruffs of their necks and pull them back from the edge, when they lean forward to gawk._

__

__

_“Step away from the edge, Ambarussa,” Maedhros calls from where he stands at the front of the line, talking with Athair. Amras immediately pulls Amrod backwards, and Amrod scowls at him but does not protest._

_“He is different, lately.”_

_“What?” Celegorm looks over to Curufin, who has come to stand beside him, looking with narrowed eyes up the line of wagons and men._

_“Maedhros. Have you not noticed?”_

_Celegorm follows Curufin’s gaze and watches his eldest brother a moment: Maedhros has returned to whatever he is discussing with Athair, and his hands move quickly as he speaks, sketching out some point he wishes to make. He has removed his hat, and his hair is sticking a little to his forehead with sweat, dark and curling. The exertion of walking alongside the wagons on the steep, uneven plains has made Celegorm and most of the men remove their coats despite the early November sharpness in the air. Jethro has even opened his shirt, and is currently mopping at his brow with the kerchief he usually wears knotted at his neck._

_Maedhros has removed neither coat nor scarf._

_“No,” Celegorm says, returning his attention to Huan, who is sitting at his heels, panting dutifully. If they are taking a moment to decide the next leg of their route, he might as well make certain Huan gets a drink. There is a bowl Celegorm keeps in his saddlebag, and he digs for it now, carefully not looking at Curufin._

_“He is. Ever since Beleriand. Celegorm,” Curufin says, his voice a little closer, now. “Were you awake when Maedhros came back?”_

_“I fell asleep,” Celegorm says, as he shares out a careful measure of his own water for his dog. Athair refuses to allow extra water rations for Huan, so Celegorm has grown accustomed to sharing his own, evenly divided between the two of them. Huan laps at the water gratefully, and Celegorm takes his own sip, scratching at the long hair behind Huan’s ears._

_“Celegorm!”_

_That is Athair’s voice, and Celegorm straightens up immediately, jamming the cap of his waterskin shut with the heel of his hand. Athair beckons him over, and Celegorm obediently trots up the line to stand beside his father and his eldest brother, who is running one hand back through his sweaty hair, looking distracted. When he notices Celegorm looking, he stops biting at his lip and smiles in his reassuring, Maedhros way, dropping his hand._

_Even with the scarf, there’s an edge of white bandaging visible, right there on his throat._

*

Their first night in Beleriand, Celegorm falls asleep sitting up, his gun held across his knees. He wakes to the sound of his father’s voice, calling his name, sounding not like his father at all.

_Go and clean your brother’s wounds._

By _your brother_ , Athair evidently means Maedhros, because it is Maedhros who is standing unsteadily, one hand wrapped in Alexander’s mane. Celegorm hastily puts his gun aside and scrambles down from the wagon, hurrying to Maedhros’ side while Maglor and Athair move away, far enough to give them privacy. 

Their faces are very grim, in the fickle firelight, and Maglor lingers at Maedhros’ side as though reluctant to leave him. His eyes catch Celegorm’s, as he turns away, and Celegorm sees an emotion there he cannot define. Fear, or anger, or something that’s partly both.

Maedhros sways, and Celegorm lunges forward to catch him by the elbow to steady him. The reaction is not what he expects: Maedhros jerks violently back with a choking gasp, and his head snaps up, one hand lifting unsteadily as if to ward Celegorm away. His eyes are wild, and he stares at Celegorm as though he is struggling to see him, though they are only an arm’s length apart. The pupils of his eyes are so wide, they are almost entirely black, like a cat’s eyes in the dark.

“Hey,” Celegorm says, stupidly. “Maedhros. Athair says you are hurt.”

His brother does not look hurt. He looks drunk, except instead of flushed his face is stark pale, and Celegorm has never seen his brother be fall-down drunk before. He is not a fool; he knows it was Maedhros who drank the last of their whiskey before they entered town, this morning. He knows Maedhros was probably drinking most hours since. But even so, he cannot think what could have pushed his eldest brother into drinking himself into this state, when even the Bridge did not. Maedhros always smells like liquor, these days, but now he smells like something else—hot bile and something else—cold sweat and something else—fresh blood and something _else_. Huan, who has now followed from Athair’s wagon to nose curiously at Celegorm’s elbow, snarls softly. Celegorm glances down, and his dog’s ears are flat back, teeth showing. 

Celegorm realizes his head is aching, a little; the sort of headache he had when he made a rare visit to see his brothers in New York, and they went to call upon Fingon in his little room at Olorin’s, the old doctor’s entire residence stifling with the scents of drying herbs, vinegars, liquors—and a jar that Fingon dared Celegorm to open, a jar labeled _ether_.

Maedhros swallows hard, twice; he lifts one hand to pass shakily over his eyes. 

“Celegorm,” he whispers. 

“Aye, it’s me. Athair says I have to take care of you, where are you hurt? Is it bad?”

Maedhros shakes his head.

“I’m all right,” he murmurs, trying to smile. The effect is ghastly, frightening Celegorm even more than the way his brother startled at his touch. Even more than the bloodied cloth Celegorm notices now, at his throat. 

“You are not all right,” he says, reaching for the knot. “You’re bleeding. Were you attacked? Was—was it the woman?”

( _A woman,_ Athair had muttered, while Maedhros listened quietly, picking with his thumbnail at the cuff of his coat but otherwise not moving at all. Celegorm, squatting in the shadow of the wagon where he was sharing his jerky with Huan, listened too. He tried to think of what woman Athair might mean, but he had noticed no one in particular since they came to Beleriand; no one that reminded him of Bauglir.

_She watched us too closely,_ Athair said. _Find out why._

And Maedhros had nodded, straightened up from the fence he had been slouched against, shoved his hands in his coat pockets, and—

_I’ll take care of it,_ Maedhros had said.)

Celegorm asks _Was it the woman_ and the expression that breaks upon Maedhros’ face, shamed and sick and frightened and bitter with self-loathing—there is the answer, all unsaid.

“Oh hell, Maitimo,” Celegorm says, a little more roughly than he intended. “ _I_ don’t care; I’m not Maglor.”

“I’m sorry,” Maedhros whispers, faintly. Celegorm is not Maglor; he will not weep. He focuses on his rising anger, instead, and then pushes that, down, too.

He asks: “Where is she now?”

“Gone, I think.” 

Celegorm reaches for the poorly knotted bandage again, and Maedhros fumbles up his own hand to catch Celegorm by the wrist, breathing quick and shallow.

“I don’t want you to see,” he says. It is the most lucid he has sounded, since he returned to the camp, but his voice has gone brittle, a thing that cracks. 

“Please, Celegorm,” Maedhros says, and it is the most wretched thing Celegorm has ever had to do: to see his eldest brother beg, and to refuse him.

“Athair says I must,” he says, and Maedhros does not resist when he unties the cloth and pulls it away.

*

_“Have you seen it?”_

_“Seen what?” Celegorm stretches lazily, rolling out the stiffness in his neck. His shoulder aches; he probably strained it a little yesterday helping at the fording of the Colorado river, when one of the wagons’ wheels got jammed. He and Maedhros had been the ones to wade into the water and throw themselves against the wheel, pushing with all their strength. He rotates the shoulder a couple times before he is satisfied there’s no deep damage._

_“You know.” Curufin is picking at his sunburn, eyes narrowed. “Maedhros’ neck. Whatever he’s hiding there.”_

_Celegorm freezes. Just a moment, and then he is reaching for his rifle again, checking the hammer, the sights, the trigger, methodically. “It’s none of our business,” he mutters._

_“I think it is.”_

_“And why,” Celegorm says harshly, rounding on his younger brother, “would you be thinking that?”_

_Curufin looks up at him guilelessly, hand dropping limply from his peeling face. He’s bleeding a little under his left eye, now, because he had been picking at the skin there._

_“Because it’s obvious someone hurt him,” Curufin says, “and I think he didn’t kill them.”_

*

“Teethmarks,” Celegorm says, dumbfounded and horrified. “Human teethmarks.”

He looks up, and there is a horror on his brother’s face, too, that changes the question Celegorm had been about to ask.

“Did you know?”

“I think—“ Maedhros begins, but his voice sounds all wrong and rusted, like he has been screaming, or maybe just wanting to scream. His hand lifts, a little jerkily, to his neck, and he touches the injury there like he had not felt it, before. The little color there was in his face is gone; his mouth twists, and he shuts his eyes.

“Oh my God, Maedhros,” Celegorm says. He wants to say something else, but the words don’t come. 

Celegorm knows what a panic is; he felt it before, when he first shot a man—when he saw the twins crying, at the Bridge—when his mother looked at his father and said _No_ , in front of all of them. He feels it now, constricting his throat like a strangling from the inside out, and it isn’t even his. 

Except maybe it is, a little.

He swallows, and reaches out one hand, very slowly.

“It’s okay,” he says, shushing like he would when bridling one of their more skittish pack horses, gentle as he can be. Celegorm has never really had cause for gentleness with people before, but it feels the same, and Maedhros reacts the same, when Celegorm touches the side of his face, very very lightly: he stiffens, his rapid, gasping breath catching, and then he calms, pulse evening, breathing slowing. He leans a little into the touch like a man utterly exhausted, wrung out beyond all bearing.

This is how you break a wild horse: gently. Not that Celegorm wishes to think of his brother in terms of breaking, but there it is.

“Come on,” Celegorm says, quietly. “Let’s get it cleaned up, before the others see.”

*

(Celegorm tried to save animals, when he was a boy: a fledgling sparrow he found fallen from its nest, a kitten he dragged from a bag in the river, a honeybee he found floundering on the kitchen floor, half-crushed. Each time, his mother was endlessly patient with his efforts. Each time, the creature died.

_Oh, Celegorm, sometimes it does not matter what you do,_ Nerdanel had sighed at last, when she found him sobbing over the body of a fox cub behind the house. One of their dogs had killed a nursing vixen earlier that week, near the chicken coop, and Celegorm had spent days searching for the animal’s den, desperate to save any baby left behind. That he found the starving pup was no consolation when it died in his arms mere hours later.

_Sometimes,_ Nerdanel had told him, stroking his hair, _God says it is time for a thing to die._ )

*

Celegorm helps Maedhros sit near the fire, and his older brother’s knees do buckle once, but Celegorm catches him before he falls. This time, Maedhros lets him.

“Do you need any help, sir?” Galway asks, eyeing Maedhros with what might be concern but which Celegorm can only see as vulgar curiosity. He hates, suddenly, the idea that anyone not in their family is privy to whatever this is: Maedhros with his eyes blown dark, trembling, with blood at his throat and a bruise on his lip.

“Fetch me the medicine kit from the supply wagon,” he orders harshly, “and then leave us.”

The Irishman blinks, then ducks his head in a bow and gets to his feet, heading to Athair’s wagon. He returns quickly, the small chest under his arm, and once he sets it down at Celegorm’s knee he nods again, casting another strange look towards Maedhros, and departs. 

Celegorm does not think much of Galway. He entered that place with Maedhros, and then he left him behind, and he never even realized that was a thing to feel guilty over, until now.

While Galway had been away fetching the kit, Celegorm had busied himself with helping Maedhros remove his coat, which now lies folded on the grass beside them. It is not very cold this near the fire, but without the coat Maedhros is shivering, though his color has improved a little. Celegorm pushes back the latch on the chest, and opens the lid. He has yet to make any use of the bottles inside, himself, but after Maedhros was shot at the Bridge, Maglor had insisted on buying a traveler’s medicine kit at the next town they came to. Celegorm squints at the tiny labels on the murky brown glass bottles: vinegar, quinine, laudanum, whiskey.

He offers the laudanum to his brother, but Maedhros shakes his head. Celegorm hesitates, then fits the laudanum back in the chest.

He uncorks the whiskey bottle, and pours a little out onto the cloth. The smell is strong and unpleasant, burning the back of Celegorm’s throat when he breathes. He wrinkles his nose.

“Let me know if it is hurting too badly,” he tells Maedhros, who nods, teeth worrying at his lower lip. But Maedhros does not react when he begins dabbing at the wound with the wet cloth, scraping and ungentle. The ragged puncture marks begin to bleed again, seeping and hot, and the cloth in Celegorm’s hand turns slowly red. 

The wound is deep. Celegorm has seen Huan hunting, of course; has seen the swift, tumultuous death, the bright blood flung across the earth. He has seen his dog licking his teeth after, the blood there, too.

This woman might have ripped out his brother’s throat.

(That she didn’t—what does it mean?)

“It might not scar,” Celegorm says, just to be saying something, in the quiet. “If we are careful.”

Maedhros makes a sound like a choked laugh, low and miserable, and presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, fingers catching in the tangled fall of his hair. 

Celegorm finishes washing out the wound as best he can, covers it with a cerate and cotton dressing from Maglor‘s kit, and wraps his brother’s neck with a new bandage. Fingon would no doubt be incensed by the shoddy work, but the thought of his cousin’s indignation does not cheer him. The entire operation takes only a couple minutes, and Maedhros does not make any further sound. When Celegorm has finished, he leaves Maedhros with Huan and puts away the kit, then returns to the fireside, where Huan has lain down with his great head on his forelegs. He looked asleep, but as Celegorm approaches he raises his head, ears pricked.

Maedhros is shivering, still, but he has not moved to pull his coat back on. He has not moved to do anything, except to cup his hand over that awful mark on his throat and hold it there, shivering. His eyes are wet.

*

Celegorm tried to save a man, once, and his hands fell right through those broken bones over his heart. 

(Each time, the animal died.)

*

“He likes it when you scratch behind his ears,” Celegorm says, abruptly. He crouches down to demonstrate, and Huan, knowing what is wanted from him like he always knows, lies still and patient, grinning his long yellow dog-grin. His tail thumps happily against the dry earth. Celegorm looks up at Maedhros, who looks back at him, blinks, and then looks down at Huan.

“All right, Huan,” Maedhros murmurs, and he still doesn’t sound like himself, but he scratches Celegorm’s dog and Celegorm’s dog huffs happily, and Maedhros smiles, a little, at the sound. 

Celegorm smiles a little, too. 

“Do you need anything more?” He asks. Maedhros shakes his head, still running his fingers through Huan’s thick, shaggy coat.

“I am well,” he says, softly. “Go back to sleep, _cano._ ”

He is lying, Celegorm knows. 

But Celegorm gets to his feet without protest, and bids Maedhros good night. He signals silently to Huan: _Stay._

Quietly, he climbs into Athair’s wagon again, and he kneels there a moment as his eyes adjust to the dark. There: the dark thatch of Caranthir’s hair, over his blanket. There: the tangle of the twins, one with his leg outflung, the other rolled on his front, hand tangled in his brother’s shirt. There: Curufin curled on his side, knees pulled in close. There: the dim firelight gleaming through the canvas, on the barrel of the gun he set aside, when Athair called.

Outside, he hears Maglor’s voice, and Maedhros, answering.

Celegorm picks up the gun, considers it, and settles back into his place of watch, sitting up against a crate. 

*

_In the Nevada desert, buzzards wheel, because a man lies weltering in his own blood, Athair’s bullet in his skull. His face has opened like a red flower, lurid on the pale sand, and Amrod makes a tiny, sobbing sound, but no one else speaks. No one else moves._

Melkor Bauglir, _Athair roars; a hunting howl and a wounded wail, all at once. Celegorm has seen thunderstorms, here, flaring out across the wasteland, bruising the sky black and searing the air with white lightning that shows blue on his brothers’ faces. Athair’s rage covers him now, electricity sparking beneath his skin, setting the hairs on his arms prickling. His heart races, surging to meet his father’s, leaping like lightning striking stone._

He slaughtered my father, _Athair cries._ He hunted my family. He marred my eldest son—

_When Maedhros opens his collar, his hands do not shake. Curufin leans forward, his eyes lit with eager curiosity. Maglor turns away._

*  
None of them will ever be well again.


End file.
